Determining Spoon Colors

[ChilliSpoons]

When approaching your day on the water how do you go about deciding what color and size of spoon to use?
Let's pretend we don't have any local knowledge or favorite spoons living in our tackle box.

Do you base your color choices and sizes on depths you'll be fishing?

Will you automatically reach for UV or Glow patterns when fishing deep?

How does the water clarity play a factor?

What about the cloud cover?

Do you match spoon color with your flasher color?

Will the time of the year effect the size or color?

 

[UkeeDreamin]

Deeper than 100' Uv or Glow or both. Deeper than 150 always a spoon with glow. Shallower than 60 I don't use the Kingfisher lites that have the glow, rather than chrome on the cupped side, want the chrome flash in shallower water. Don't really use the dark day-dark colour, bright day-bright colour like I do in rivers and lakes. If no intel and not relying on past knowledge, the standby's - cop car (or variants like super trooper or kitchen sink), army truck and green/glow (usually Irish Creme) are the go to's. They have good contrast and colours that work everywhere. I also stay small to start out, 3.5" and 4" coyotes or kingfishers and even the small coho-killers unless intel or feed in the first fishes guts says go bigger (exception is on banks off west coast, a good sized sand lance spoon is always on one rod). If guts have bigger bait then out will come the Andrew P's sand lance if full size sand lance are around or larger Tomic spoons if big herring or pilchard.

I do try to match my spoon colour to my flasher, but that's probably more for me. For flashers, my big debate is whether or not to use them at all or, if I do, whether or not to use 8" or 11". First preference is in-line style flasher as dummy off the ball and spoon on its own off a clip above. Less preferred is 8" flasher with 2.5-3.5ft to spoon and least preferred is full size flasher and spoon, 5-6ft leader. Big flashers and spoons work, no denying it but - I hate fighting fish with a full-size 11" flasher in-line. I tend to run 25lb leader with spoons as worried heavier/stiffer may affect their action (I run 40lb for hootchies).

Having said that, intel is your most important piece of gear and worth the investment of stopping in the local tackle shop and dropping some $'s or taking a sack of beer down to the docks to talk to the local guides. Locations, depths, size and type of gear, etc, etc, saves a ton of trial and error time!

Cheers!

Ukee

 

[ChilliSpoons]

Thanks for your reply.

Do you put thought into the color spectrum that indicates that reds disappear at shallow depths and blues show up deeper?

I often see red as accent colors on spoons but wonder about their effectiveness at depths. My experiences when scuba diving is that colors do disappear even at relatively shallow depths.

 

[ericl]

Been fishing Spoons at Ucluelet/Tofino since 1989. The first were 3.5" Coyote's as that was the only size. No Flasher - NEVER. The pattern I used has been discontinued. Blue/white at Portland Point, green/white down at South Bank S/W Corner.
This was early season on the bottom needlefish. When the Herring/Pilchards move in later season, Cop Cars or the Tomic Pilchard Patterns in the largest size fished 50 - 100 ft. Now that there are UV models, I always buy UV. Coyote makes a color called "super trooper"; cop car with a green stripe down the middle. Haven't fished deep in years as the Columbia River "Footballs" we used to catch deep in May/June seem to have disappeared.
If you wanted to vary lure color with water color I'd do bright with clear water & muted in dark water.
As for seeing different colors deep, I am confident the fish see quite different than we do.

 

[Reeltime]

I've had more hits locally on Irish cream all year round , seems like van likes the green /chartreuse in all gear so i stick to that .. or chrome coho killer for clean water deadly .

Like to have faith in gear that works when fishing is slow . troll troll troll lolll fish on !!

 

[Bait&Sea]

If stacking its Glow on Bottom and UV on top, I try and match gear color to water color in prop wash. When in dirty water ie Fraser runoff it's usually all glow leaning towards chartreuse for color.

 

[Seafever]

Experiment. It's amazing how a tiny spoon like a Coho killer will catch large salmon......and then you can take that off and put on a 5 inch plug and do the same thing.

Even though the general bait may be be 4 inches at that time, let's say, when you get a fish and cut it open there's a 6 inch + herring in the stomach many a time.

Around here people rave about the 3 1/2 inch spoon size. But most of the fish I ever caught had bigger fish in their stomachs.

Some days one lure is hot...and the next day it doesn't work at all..